


Little Gray Cells

by Sara Generis (kanadka)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1920s, Cabarets, Case Fic, Crimes & Criminals, Crossdressing, Detectives, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Gore, Murder Mystery, Politics, but only OCs die, essentially
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 18:28:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13300704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanadka/pseuds/Sara%20Generis
Summary: Alice Kirkland lives in Berlin, trying to make her life work between solving most of her boyfriend's cases and writing up similar fictional versions under a pseudonym. She's generally successful at this until Roderich takes a case involving a dead white émigré and an elusive, untouchable Prussian aristocrat, who is the last person who saw the victim alive. Alice could handle a murder case, she could even handle Weimar Republic politics, but handling thoseandMaria von Waldow, née Beilschmidt, proves tricky.





	Little Gray Cells

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! this is a giftfic for the [2017 pruk secret santa exchange](http://prukevents.tumblr.com/post/167119588142/pruk-secret-santa-2017) on tumblr! The original version, intended as the actual gift for the recipient, can be found [on tumblr here](http://kanadka.tumblr.com/post/169441461441/little-gray-cells-t-rated-version), and that one is rated T. But the chemistry seemed to work for a smut scene, so here is the version that gets explicit. Please enjoy!!

There's nothing like getting to the underground station and realising you will, inevitably, be late through circumstances outside your control. Around the entrance there are two guards looking serious. Meanwhile, on the tracks of the upper platform, over by the other end, where Alice has to descend to the lower platform to catch her train, there is a swarm of police peering away at something and snapping flash pictures.

Pictures are only for a serious crime. Alice's heart picks up the pace.

She does not recognise Roderich among the officers, but probably he has been called, because he wasn't working a case as of this morning and here is one that can fall into his lap.

She peers forward through the crowd of people. Lots have gathered to gawp, trying to see past the circle of officers. One of Alice's long blonde pigtails lands on someone's shoulder, and they brush it off with a glare. We can't all have fashionable bob cuts, thinks Alice, glaring back.

Admittedly, Alice is gawping herself, but her eyes employ a little more scrutiny than most. There's shards of glass where the police are, looks like green glass, which is likely wine. The tiled wall of the subway across the platform is stained with a violent purple splatter, dried shiny, and the broken glass is strewn over the tracks, but there's one or two still on the platform tagged with signs, someone has probably already snapped pictures -

On track level, one of the policemen's grip slips, and an arm, jutting out from a pressed shirt with ugly golden baubles of cufflinks, tumbles free from a handsome, expensive-looking navy coat (not a uniform, Alice notes). The arm falls with a dull thunk and does not move. The fingers are limp and pale. A hush and at least one or two girlish shrieks come from the crowd of onlookers around her. The circle of policemen quickly reforms, and the body is at last moved onto a gurney where it is lifted - more carefully - to the platform.

A body!

In her excitement to watch the men work around the crime scene, Alice misses four trains in her direction on the lower platform.

It is the first thing she talks about when she enters Roderich's office. More than a few people notice this, and those that recognise her as not a secretary recognise her too as Roderich's girlfriend. It is not at all uncommon that she comes in, as they meet daily for coffee, he the handsome uniformed junior detective, she his arm-candy.

They usually meet at ten. It is now quarter to eleven.

Alice shuts the door behind her. "What can you tell me about the murder at Gleisdreieck station today?" she asks.

"Sorry I'm late for our daily coffee, Roderich," says Roderich in a poor falsetto.

Alice ignores him. "I want details," she says. "I _must_  have details."

"You don't even know it was a murder," he replies.

"An accidental fall on the station? He must have hit his head rather hard, and the distance between the platform and the tracks is not so great, he would have had to have struck his head precisely so. The likelihood that he fell in such a way to have struck himself is slim, and anyway his shoes had too good tread. Someone made sure our victim would not get up again."

Roderich narrows his eyes. "'Our' victim?" he says.

"You know I'm right," says Alice. "You'll repeat that to your superior officer in one hour and he'll think you're brilliant and give you full reign on the case with whoever you want as your second. Which, in an ideal world, _would_  be me."

"My, but you do have your ambitions," says Roderich blandly.

Alice presses her lips together, a prim pleased smirk. "I'll use this in my next novel. Now, details."

Roderich is clearly unhappy about it. "They found him there when the station opened in time for the first trains. Young guy, can't be more than twenty-six. Station operator rang it in but they didn't move him, because Sarubin recognised the stitching on his coat as distinctly Russian. We're still waiting for the Soviet ambassador to return our calls."

"Why bother," says Alice. "Cufflinks like that? He's rich, young, and he wore no wedding ring. _He's_  certainly not doing his clothes himself. If he's a Russian he's possibly getting his clothes laundered by that place out in Charlottenburg, they speak some Russian. They also stamp the inside of the collar, just underneath the right point. Invisible ink, to make which order goes to which customer. You'll have your name in a quarter of the time it takes you to wait for the Soviets, _and_  you'll keep the investigation internal."

Alice sits primly, waiting for appreciation that she knows isn't coming. "You _know_  if you tell the Soviets that they'll want some oversight," she adds.

Roderich scowls. "I should've thought of that," he mutters.

Alice softens, a bit, for the sake of Roderich's stiff and ugly pride. "Go on, go tell your superior," she says again. Roderich says nothing and leaves, which suits her fine.

\--

Half an hour later, Roderich returns with a folder. Alice has been busy scribbling notes in her pocketbook. "Case is mine," he says, "if I want it. Ultraviolet light showed the stamp, just like you said. We put a call out to the place in Charlottenburg. Assuming he's wearing his own shirt, that's Anton Lopukhin."

Roderich pauses as though this should mean something to Alice, but it doesn't and eventually he continues, huffy. "Related somehow distantly to the von Wrangel family," he says. "That probably means little to you."

"An aristocrat," says Alice. A Russian aristocrat. Probably a white émigré. Alice begins thinking.

"Yes," says Roderich. "Now, look, are we going for coffee or aren't we? I'm going to find myself with rather a lot of work to do if I take this case."

"Oh, you'll take it," she says.

"Oh, I shall, shall I!" exclaims Roderich sarcastically. But he doesn't say anything more, because he knows that she'll be the one solving it for him.

\--

By the time they return from coffee, there are a few more interesting findings.

The photographs have come back from development. In the pictures, Lopukhin lies strewn on the tracks as though a sack of deadweight tossed overboard. His arms and legs are splayed wide, and the back of his head had made direct contact with one of the train tracks - the hair is matted with blood, and it pools around him like a perverse halo on an Orthodox icon. There's a discolouration of some sort on his shirt front. Alice can't tell if it's a smudge or a stain. It really would have been best, she thinks, if she could have been at the crime scene herself instead of poring over grainy black-and-white pictures.

But she's not a detective, she's just the girlfriend of one.

On the larger shards of glass that were collected, they have found fingerprints. Most are his, but at least a few of them around the neck can't be. Matching them to another person will be difficult, though because many are only half prints and may lack 12 matching points for a positive match. And it doesn't necessarily mean anything, anyway - a bartender or shopkeep of some sort had to have given him that wine in the first place. Nobody cleans their wine bottle with such assiduousness before drinking from it - anyone who would, would simply use a glass.

The most interesting part is the hairs they collect from his shirt. They are bright white - Lopukhin is black-haired - and they're not cat hairs.

By mid-afternoon there is yet more news. One of the police officers comes back and says that he has set up a meeting for Roderich with a lead - a friend of Lopukhin's, willing to come forward and also identify the body. Possibly a witness? It was unclear. Nevertheless, a lead is a lead. But Roderich has to be there tomorrow morning at eight - _sharp_  - and the officer in question spoke only to a representative of a representative who called in, with no guarantee that the lead themselves will show.

"Aristocracy," says Roderich, curling his lips. "Like I can spend half my day waiting on them."

"You just hate them because you want to be them," says Alice.

Roderich sours further. "Well you can't do any interviewing yourself," he snaps. "You're not a member of the case."

\--

Even if Roderich was in a good mood - which he wasn't in the morning, that early - he could never allow Alice to interview the lead herself. There's protocol waiving, which they do all the time whenever he tells her details of his work, or lets her snoop around and rummage through pictures and cases (for her novels, always for her novels). And then there's Roderich's _actual job_.

It's been three years that Alice is in Berlin. Yes, Berlin, of all places, when not five years ago she was a nurse on the front against them (which the foreigner's office doesn't know, because she didn't tell them, and she assumes they are too swamped with work to have dug around and found out). But Berlin is big, beautiful, exciting, and it's been good for her German skills where the war was not.

Alice is here for two reasons: because Roderich is here, and he will probably ask for her hand in marriage in another year or so, and she will probably accept; and because Berlin is a thrilling place where exciting, dangerous things happen all the time. Where the sun seems to set sooner, where the eerie fog and mist penetrate the city's trees and parks, where the boundary between lawful and immoral is daily crossed, where everything is surreal in both an artful and horrifying way.

Berlin is the setting for all of Arthur Kirkland's novels. Kirkland is quickly becoming the new household name in crime fiction in England, though he's a secretive soul who never leaves his Soho apartment. Nobody else knows that he doesn't exist - yet another one of Alice's creations - except Roderich, who forwards the manuscripts to the publisher.

Alice has her own ambitions. They don't include Roderich directly. Oh, it's true, she loves him - after a fashion - but they never had much in the way of chemistry. The closest they have ever come were those times that he comes home late after an incident and tells her about it. Crimes shouldn't arouse someone like this, Alice is certain.

Still, he doesn't mind her hanging around the police department - she's developed a wicked taste for working his cases, and she's better at it than he is. It's not that he's not clever - though, he _isn't_  as clever as she is - he is simply lazy. But he has had three promotions since Alice began working with him, and the money is too good to pass up in this economic climate.

Alice tries not to think about it much. That one man steals credit for her work, and another steals credit for her words.

So she returns early the next morning. She can't be around, but her idea was to ask a few questions herself. Try and catch the eye of the lead. Get a glimpse, pretend she's the press, yell out a question, provoke a response, anything. She has a few ideas. She has to try _something_. Her mind is buzzing.

She spots an advancing crowd of policemen, which always means something, so she follows her instincts and inches closer, and then she doesn't even have air to gasp.

Surrounded by the crowd - and a few trailing press quickly stalled at the doors by guards - is a single woman. Clearly aristocratic, which means this must be Roderich's appointment. She's even on time. But that's not what pulls the breath from Alice's lungs. It's not even the windswept hair pinned perfectly into place and topped with a brimless black felt hat. ( _White_  hair, Alice notes.) It's not her clothes - a rich mahogany brown coat, tailored for her curves and spilling from her hips to her ankles, the shoulders topped with fur, her thin spider fingers in long gloves. It's the woman's hard, pointed face - slices of cheekbones, the sharp summit that is the nose tip, and those piercing dark eyes. Beauty like ice.

As the woman struts past with her head held high and her shoulders square, a shaft of light from the nearest window crosses her face, and her eyes turn abruptly in Alice's direction.

Time dilates.

Alice had thought her eyes were brown, like her coat, but in the light they are clearly crimson. The woman's eyes narrow, or at least they seem to, and the look she gives Alice conveys a message in an instant image: ice? but ice is brittle, ice melts. _This_  is the kind of beauty that is dangerous, deadly, and devastating. Don't get too close, her eyes say, or you'll see my teeth, and they have a nasty snap.

A bead of sweat trails down the nape of her neck, but Alice feels too trapped to wipe the tickle away. She gasps; her lips part. The woman's answer hers with a smirk. Alice sways forward as though pulled, entranced ...

But the woman says nothing, and her gaze shifts. She appears to look through Alice, disdainful and ignorant of Alice's terror. Her pace passes and she walks on, flanked by her team of officers who lead her down the east wing of the building to the morgue. A spell has lifted.

This cannot be just a lead, thinks Alice, her heart racing. No one who commands that kind of power in just her poise can be only a lead. She's the kind who wraps men around her fingers and gets them to do things for her.

The dead fellow Lopukhin, Alice realises, was possibly one of them.

\--

"Who was she," asks Alice later that afternoon.

"Who was who," says Roderich, his mouth full of croissant. He swallows the crumbs. "Oh, you mean the lead? She came in to identify the body and we asked her a few questions. She's not a witness but she's so far the last person who saw Lopukhin alive. She was a countess of some sort, before the war. I don't know."

"Yes you do," says Alice. "You pay way too much attention to aristocrats."

Roderich, caught, looks sheepish. "Maria Gräfin von Waldow," he says. "She's - she's from somewhere in the east. Family's complicated. Well, it always is. Why do you care about her? Don't you want to know more details of the investigation?"

"That's why I'm asking," says Alice. "She identified him?"

Roderich shoves the last of the croissant in his mouth and nods. When he's finished chewing and swallowing - Alice waits impatiently - he says, "She was sad at his death. But not as sad as I would have thought. We cleaned the body up, of course, but there was still a lot of blood."

"Women see more blood than men," says Alice.

At this, Roderich looks positively squeamish. "Anyway," he says. "She wasn't bawling or beside herself in tears, is what I'm saying."

This doesn't surprise Alice. Not after seeing her earlier. "Did you expect her to be?"

"She said she was personally acquainted with him," says Roderich. "If _I_  had been personally acquainted with someone who showed up dead the next day after I saw him last - dead like that - well, sure, I'd be shocked. She seemed to have no such surprise." He shrugs. "Maybe she was used to it. Maybe Lopukhin went with a dangerous crowd."

Possibly. "Or possibly von Waldow herself is dangerous," says Alice.

"You don't really think," says Roderich.

 _You_  don't know how she looked at me, Alice wants to say. But something stops her saying it. It's the _how she looked at me_  part. Some part of her doesn't want anybody else to know how that tigress looked at her. A larger part doesn't want Roderich especially to know. For that split second, thinks Alice, she invited herself into me. And I'd let her. I'd wanted it.

So Roderich continues. "It's not that I don't think women could kill," he says. "You know I don't think that, not after two years working in the Mordkommission. Oh, the weaker sex is capable. I just think, with all her money, and all, that if she did do it she would have hidden a dead body better than she did."

"Money," says Alice.

"Sure," says Roderich. "Don't you know about the Waldow family?" Alice shakes her head, and Roderich rolls his eyes. "Brandenburgers, originally. This branch moved out east seven generations ago, so they're Junkers through and through now. Er- not that I pay attention to these things."

Alice supposes it makes him useful. "You keep track of that, I'll keep track of this," she says. "What did she say in the interrogation?"

"According to her, Lopukhin and she were drinking it up at Ruschel's - it's the neighbourhood pub around the corner from the station, on Kleiststraße. She said they liked to chat there, that they had mutual acquaintances. Anyway, they were talking, as they did."

"What about?"

"She said only _this and that_ ," says Roderich. "But privately, outside of her published written statement, she confided in me that he had wanted to propose to her, if she would convert to the Orthodoxy, and she wasn't interested in that - she's far too faithful to the Old Prussian Union Church - so she had to let him down. Evidently she lacks some tact in this area. She was under the impression he would be leaving for Paris; he wanted to stay in Berlin. For her, she said, until she changed her mind. Well, she said she never would, and never for him. He grew enraged, said she led him on, they fought briefly, he stormed off."

"And the wine bottle?" asks Alice.

"Grabbed it before he took off," Roderich explains. "She takes off after him, trying to soften the blow. She said she was certain there would be a lovely girl he could meet in Paris. One who was more Russian, probably. He wouldn't listen. He leaves for the station, she goes after him, but not into the station - a lady doesn't ride the subway, you know. She said it wasn't uncharacteristic for Lopukhin, he was something of a high-strung sort of fellow, especially after all that he endured in his own land, he's never really gotten over his own exile. She returned to the bar not long after to finish her drink and wait for him there. When he didn't show after an hour, she hailed a cab and left. Perhaps midnight or so. The cabbie could verify."

"An hour, at a place like that?" asks Alice.

"That's what I thought too. But she wasn't alone. They had mutual acquaintances. She said, she got to talking and the time slipped away." Roderich pulls a face. "I know the pub, it's a filthy place, it's really not where a lady like von Waldow should be."

"Then neither should a fancy gent like Lopukhin," adds Alice.

"Well, that's different," says Roderich, "sometimes gentlemen have business." Which ladies naturally _never_  have, thought Alice.

\--

The rest of Alice's day is taken up with the society pages. Women's pages are women's work, said Roderich, and he's mocking about it, trying to rile her up, but Alice genuinely doesn't mind. Part of it is the cryptographic fun of cataloguing who is who because the activities of the rich and famous are lovingly detailed but their names omitted. The libel suits would be explosive otherwise. The other part is building up a slow character profile of von Waldow. As Alice comes to find, she is not so elusive in the society pages. Details of her exploits at filthy bars and going into clubs (half-disguised, almost like she wants to be talked about) are sandwiched between other "women's" information like fashion and homemaking tips.

"Pay attention to those recipes," says Roderich, teasing, "you'll be cooking for me one day."

"You will be making us schnitzel until we die, and we both know it," Alice replies tonelessly.

Von Waldow is her mother's name. Her parents are divorced; her mother was the nobility, and her father a commoner - some no-name something-Schmidt. The papers are constantly making reference to the hot blood that will out in young Maria. There's further some drama involved with her father and a mistress which resulted in a bastard - her mother didn't stand for such a thing and left the husband, who died in the war. And nobody knows what became of the bastard. Anyway, Maria - to be pedantic and complete, and according to the baptism certificate Roderich is sent from Königsberg, _Maria Luise Friederike Wilhelmine Juliane von Waldow_  - has an interesting life that is threaded in and out and in and out like a running stitch through the society papers. She goes to a lot of clubs where she shouldn't be, but attends more than her fair share of benefits where she spreads the wealth. About half of the benefits are for military veterans from the Great War, the other half are for the left-leaning artistic circles.

Lopukhin and von Waldow were often seen together. Rarely at the artistic benefits, sometimes at the benefits for military veterans, most often at clubs. They appear to be good friends, though the papers are constantly hinting at something more. Lopukhin himself had been here two years, having come from St Petersburg by way of Tallinn, then Stockholm, then Stettin. He very quickly garnered the reputation of a playboy: the family had plenty of foreign investments and assets whose money was unlockable for his purposes, so he was not one of those emigres who found himself suddenly destitute selling off great-grandmother's jewels, but one rather that found himself with abundant funds now all his own (his four older brothers having died in the Russian civil war). Berlin pleases him very greatly. The society pages suggest he has been to nigh on every club and sampled each pleasure therein.

So too, they note, has von Waldow.

Then one article about von Waldow suggests that their growing connection will harm her reputation, and from this point forward in time, she begins to be catalogued with others, particularly another man who is described as blond with slicked-back hair, in the clubs. They do not mention him at all, not even with dashes through the name, like they do with _M---- von Wa---- who was spotted leaving a dive pub in a crimson silk shirt with what appears to be, judging from the décolletage, no bustier or corset or bust-fastening of any kind_ , the very night Lopukhin died. This suggests to Alice that this man isn't known to the society papers at all and may not be aristocratic. After all, he never appears at the benefits, to which _M---- von Wa---- now attends alone, in her white long coat with its geometric motif which is terribly fashionable this season atop a lurid green striped Patou Robe de Style with coquettish ruffles gathered on the hip_.

They don't ever seem to ask what she's doing at all of these benefits. What she's thinking, why she goes to the clubs she does, why she keeps the company she keeps. She's like a doll for them to dress, thinks Alice. There's danger behind her eyes, there's intelligence in that mind, Alice only needed a split second to see that.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the phone. As Roderich is away at lunch, she takes the call and plays secretary.

It's the cabbie from the company, so she takes his name and a statement. "And you're sure," she says. "You recognised her?"

"Sure did," says the man, a Mister Reinhardt Krause. "It's not the first time we give her a lift, y'know. She's very sweet. I wouldn't charge her, but she insists."

"And you picked her up from ...?"

"Ruschel's," says Krause. "I remember, it was right out front of the chipped front step."

"And could you clarify when about you returned to her apartment?"

"The one out in Lankwitz? Oh yes - we got back at - ah, now that would have been - er, midnight. Yes, it was midnight. I remember now! Nice lady. She tips real well."

The one out in Lankwitz, thinks Alice. According to the authorities, there is only _one_  apartment registered under her name.

Alice should play secretary more often.

\--

The autopsy report comes back that afternoon. Roderich gives her a copy and she reads it during dinner.

There's nothing in Lopukhin's stomach contents except a lot of booze and not a lot of food. He was probably very drunk at the time of death because the blood alcohol content remained high. The spectroscope has revealed traces of gunpowder and alcohol on the clothes.

"Gunpowder," murmurs Alice. "I thought he hit his head. The blood was everywhere on the tracks."

"Do we really have to talk about this at dinner," says Roderich.

"It's not like you made a red sauce, don't be such a baby," says Alice.

Roderich is not particularly enthused about this line of conversation, but goaded on by Alice's words he ploughs forward. "There, uh, there was a lot of, um. Blood on the tracks. That's true. But then we found the bullet. And there's soot smudges and powder burns, we had almost overlooked those."

"On his shirt?" asks Alice. "Shirt also had wine, if I remember."

"And traces of blood, too. Probably his own, from the incident."

"Did you get someone to look at it?" asks Alice. She brings up one of the photographs of Lopukhin's body.

"I can't believe you keep that in your purse," says Roderich.

"Here," she says, ignoring him. "If he were shot first, then doused in alcohol, it would have faded the smudge more. Smudge is dark, leads me to think the shirt was wet first - alcohol - then he was shot. Remember that, when you make your notes later. Now, as for the blood spatter, I don't see a lot on the collar like it pooled there, dropping down from the wound by gravity, it seems to have been ejected forcefully, spraying out of him -"

"Alice, I am _eating_ ," says Roderich.

"Fine," says Alice. "What of von Waldow?"

"Well, we've obtained a sample of her handwriting for psychological constitution," says Roderich.

Alice rolls her eyes. "That's crackery and you know it."

"It's not!"

"In any case," says Alice, returning to the autopsy report, "the spectroscope shows the gunpowder composition is common make. Whoever used the gun, it would have been something that was standard issue in the army."

"Von Waldow absolutely did not serve in the Great War," argues Roderich.

"You know I know women did in fact serve," says Alice.

"Sure," he snaps, "but she wasn't one of them. She was at university for the entire duration. I'm surprised you don't already know that, you seem so _extraordinarily_  taken with the details that feature her."

Alice blushes. "Just trying to fit together the loose ends," she mutters nastily. "So the bullet was removed from the brain, then?"

"Alice," begins Roderich.

"I'm not talking about the details! Seems more likely he was shot first then pushed onto the tracks. The opposite is possible based on the brain matter -"

"Alice!" says Roderich.

"- but it's unlikely because of the smudge marks and sootstains on the clothing. He was shot at close range, so ... unless the other person got onto the tracks, and the brains on the tracks -"

" _Can you please stop_ ," says Roderich.

An awkward silence reigns over the dinner table.

"Can't you talk of anything else?" he asks, exasperated.

Alice remains quiet.

After a moment the silence gets to Roderich, too. "You just get so," he mutters. He trails off.

"I wouldn't want to write about this if it didn't interest me," Alice says. "I thought it interested you too. You made a career out of it, after all."

" _You_  made my career," says Roderich. He sighs. Then he picks up the autopsy report. "Alright. We'll have it your way. The bullet appears to be a slug from an army issue gun. Yes?"

"Problem, everybody who was in the army has that gun," says Alice. "So it doesn't mean anything. If they had the exact gun, they might be able to compare bullet markings."

"But without the exact weapon, when all of those guns look the exact same unless the bullets are under a microscope," adds Roderich, "we can't conclude anything."

"Useless," agrees Alice, and finishes eating.

\--

The following day Roderich calls her at nine in the morning. The landlady at Alice's lodging house - an ageing war widow - has better things to do with her time than run up three flights of stairs to fetch Alice for a phone call from her boyfriend but that's the natural problem with a communal telephone. "Why are you already at work?" asks Alice.

"I've been here for an hour," says Roderich. "With no coffee. I guess you could say it's been... _murder_."

"You're hilarious," says Alice flatly.

"We have a meeting," explains Roderich. "Can you be here in fifteen minutes?"

" _NO_ ," shouts Alice, "are you mad? The train alone takes twenty minutes!"

"Then get here as soon as you can," he says, "I'll try and stall."

Somehow, she makes it in twenty-nine.

"Ah, good!" says Roderich, when Alice is ushered into a small room off the main wing of the police department by a young officer low on the hierarchy. Within is Roderich, a desk with a typewriter, and a nasty-looking rheumy-eyed man with a bushy moustache in sore need of trimming. The door closes behind her and Roderich begins. "May I present my stenographer. Fräulein Kirkland, this is Herr Doktor Eckhard Meinecke."

"Charmed," drawls Meinecke, who clearly isn't. "Edelstein, don't tell me you can't afford better help, I shan't believe it. At least she's pretty. Now, this had better be confidential..."

Alice says nothing, because women aren't really supposed to, and also because she's technically not a stenographer. She's not hired by the police department at all. Roderich doesn't pay her a retainer, and wouldn't even if he could. She sits down at the typewriter.

"I was also at the bar," says Meinecke. "Ruschel's, you know, it's a - well, it's a filthy place. Run by that cad Pinkus." Meinecke eyes Roderich at this, but he doesn't react. "I shouldn't have been there, either. But there was an associate of mine I had to meet with, it wasn't by my choice at all! If I could have helped it - you know I stand publicly for... certain things, so it's unbecoming and unseemly for me to be in such a place. Especially with my political career. Ach, Berlin! This city breeds the satyr in all of us -"

"In any case, you were present," says Roderich.

"Er, yes," says Meinecke. "I was at the bar, and only turned around when Lopukhin - the Russian fellow, you know - began shouting. I turned around, and there was von Waldow, shrieking back at him. Now, I don't know what to make of her. She comes to some of the benefits that our party hosts. I thought perhaps she would have been a more ardent supporter. She has from time to time made contributions! But then Anton mentions she also attends benefits for the Social Democrats. And that she makes contributions for them. It's probably because she's a woman. I thought, perhaps Lopukhin was trying to steer her clear, perhaps, try and show her the right path. These wayward souls, the fragile sex!"

"So you knew Lopukhin, then?" asks Alice.

Meinecke glares at Alice. "Er, no," he says flatly. "Not well. Simply the name." To Roderich, he continues talking. "Rich fellow, you know? I like to keep track of them, and he comes to the benefits for our party. I thought, he might someday make a contribution, financial or otherwise."

"Is that what they were talking about?" asks Roderich. "Politics?"

"Why, no," says Meinecke. "They were talking about their ... romantic connection, or what-have-you. But she wasn't having any of it. She said we're heading in different directions, yours must take you to Paris, you cannot stay here on my behalf, I will not have what you would provide, and he was - why, he was all but pledging his love for her. Respectable man like that! And _she_  goes to the clubs, you know. She should take what's offered her. I heard it said it's because she's too faithful, pah! I don't believe it. I thought, privately, Lopukhin ought to stay here, there's _work_  for him where his interests lie, where there are none in Paris - if, er, you take my meaning. There's - well." Meinecke breaks off to look warily at Alice.

"Whatever you want in your statement," supplies Roderich, "you're not bound to say anything more of your side of the story than you need to."

"We have our projects," says Meinecke simply. "Anton, with his resources, would have been invaluable to them. Not only for financing. But an aristocratic influence could really make things move. Ah, that is, metaphorically. But he clearly doesn't listen to reason where she is concerned, I think, and he fled."

"Did he take the wine with him or did she bring it?" asks Alice.

Meinecke glares again at Alice. "Of course he took it," he snaps. "He paid for it, after all. I'm sure he wanted to drink it. Get _something_  out of this ... this ill-conceived dalliance! Why, I shouldn't blame him."

"And you didn't see him return," says Alice.

Meinecke looks from Roderich to Alice and back again. "No," he says.

"But she did?" Alice asks.

"Yes," says Meinecke. And then he adds, "You really ought to know your place, Fräulein -"

"My stenographer is kept apprised of all goings on of the investigation," says Roderich quickly. "Her questions are my questions."

Meinecke glares. From the crows' feet around his beady little eyes, it seems to be something he does often. "She returned about three hours later," he says.

"Hmm, what time would that be," muses Alice, well aware of math but wanting Meinecke to assert it himself.

"Possibly quarter to one?" says Meinecke. "She stayed another hour, then left on foot. And that's all I have to say about that ... lady. If such she can be called!"

"Thanks for your statement, Herr Doktor," says Roderich.

"Hmm, yes," says Meinecke. He further prompts, "And in exchange, just to clarify...?"

"Ah. Yes," says Roderich. "The Sitte will drop all charges."

"Good," replies Meinecke greasily. "That's what I like to hear." Roderich gets up and crosses the room to knock on the door, which opens a second later. The young officer stationed outside escorts Meinecke away and closes the door behind them.

" _Really?_ " says Alice.

"He came forward," says Roderich, with a helpless shrug. "He volunteered. We haven't been getting a lot of leads on the Lopukhin murder. Gabler agreed to it. In fact, it was Gabler's idea."

"So you let that nasty man get away with - with whatever the Moral Department had against him - god, Roderich! I hope it wasn't anything too awful."

Roderich very carefully doesn't say anything. "His information'll help, won't it," he says.

Alice purses her lips. Yes, it probably will. "I don't like it," she says.

"Well, you don't have to," says Roderich. "Just solve the case."

\--

It's true what Roderich said about von Waldow - because of course Alice double-checks, how dare Roderich know something she doesn't. The young von Waldow did all her schooling in the east where her mother's side of the family is landowning (father Beilschmidt was a Brandenburger, not of a name Alice would recognise, even if she knew anything about nobility). Her mother never remarried, and expected her daughter rather to carry on her position and name to the exclusion of all others. This includes in any possible future marriage, which according to society papers, Maria seems hellbent on carrying out her mother's wishes. Privately, it makes Alice proud. If only I'd had a mother like that, she thinks.

What was it that Meinecke said, that von Waldow shrieked to Lopukhin? _I will not have what you would provide._

Von Waldow works for a living, though not particularly hard. From time to time she submits an article for the Culture section in the Berliner Börsen-Courier. Alice pores over her articles, lingering carefully on the words. She wonders what was in that head when they were composed; she wonders about the hand that penned them. There's attention to detail in the pacing, in the word choice. There's cleverness in the wordplay. There's subtlety.

Alice expected to find nepotism in the printed word, since it's the von Waldow family that owns the factory where the Börsen-Courier is printed. And Alice should know what good writing looks like. Unfortunately, this is it. Von Waldow is careful and intelligent.

Furthermore, she seems to have enjoyed her time at the Albertina, as her notes were glowing, particularly in politics and philosophy and she has nothing but nice recommendations from professors in these domains. The letters seem even genuine.

Alice wonders if the professors would describe the von Waldows as particularly good tippers, too, because it's the same thing the bartender at Ruschel's says.

"Sure, I gave him the wine," says the bartender, an Otto 'Pinkus' Mattner. "Put it right in his hands. Guess I should have cut him off. Maybe then he wouldn't've died. But he was always nasty, I can't say I'm that sorry. Well, is that what you're here about? You look a little young to be one of them vice squad bulls. And I'll remind you, we're not breaking any rules being open all the way 'til 3 am, that's the law no matter what that scoundrel Meinecke says, boozing the way he does in here and talking the way he does in the Reichstag -"

"I just want to talk," says Alice. "About Lopukhin... you said he and his lady fought?"

"Ehh... him I knew less well. Now _she's_ a fine lady, a good soul, she's always got a smile for us and a coin for me. I lend my ear a lot because I'm paid, she does it because she cares. Should probably see her in church more often but she never goes."

"Oh?" says Alice. "Which one does she attend?"

"The one down the street," says the bartender quickly. "She's free with the coin, that's all that matters. She's always dressed up proper. Why, she wears her Sunday best when she's here, 'cause she's respectful like that, not that a yowling tomcat like Lopukhin would know it. Now he put his grubby paws all over her that night, ripped the lace collar, that was handmade lace - a pretty pfennig, my sister sells it! - you don't do that to a white lace shirt if you want to make her your girl, and I don't care what they say about the rich, they've grubby paws as any. Aw, she was right to drive 'im off."

Alice narrows her eyes. "When did she leave here, that night Lopukhin died?"

The bartender thinks a moment. "Round about midnight, I think? I called her a cab."

"I thought she hailed one," said Alice.

"Something like that. I don't recall. Anyway, she took a cab. That what you came 'round here for? You want anything else, you'll pay."

But unlike von Waldow, Alice hasn't got any spare coin to make the bartender talk - or make him shut up, as the case may be - so she leaves.

She's late getting home from Ruschel's and when she arrives, Roderich is there, with a station car parked down the road. "I would have waited in your room, but your landlady wouldn't hear of it," he says. He looks her up and down. "Did... did you... you forgot about the policemen's ball tonight, didn't you. I thought you went home to change!"

"No, I went to Ruschel's," she says.

"Alice!" Roderich is scandalised.

"It's broad daylight! I only went to talk to the bartender!"

"Ladies shouldn't be seen there," says Roderich. "What if you were _spotted?_ "

"Well _someone_  had to take a statement and it wasn't you," snaps Alice.

"If you do anything like that ever again, and if someone finds you, and - God forbid! - takes a picture, you know it'll be the end of us, you know that, right? With my family - they'll send it to Vienna - there'll be talk," says Roderich. "How could you be so reckless?"

"I've just about solved your case," exclaims Alice. "Don't you want to hear about that?"

"About the case," says Roderich. He sighs. "Gabler's asked me to drop the inquiry on Lopukhin's murder."

"What? But he's an aristocrat! Nobody wants to know what happened to him?"

"There's been..." Roderich takes another deep breath. "There's been a - _rather_  - sizeable donation received. Just in time for the ball. From -"

"From the von Waldow family," Alice hisses.

"That... can't be proven, of course." Roderich seems as unhappy as she is. "Look, our hands are tied," he says. "Gabler says he'll take care of the investigation now."

"She did it, you know that, don't you," says Alice. "You've already let a man who - whatever Meinecke was into - you've let him go, and now you're going to let this wicked girl go, too. And she's killed a man. With whose gun, I don't know, but someone's. Suppose she does this again!"

"Then all I can say is, I hope she doesn't do it in Berlin," says Roderich.

"I want to confront her," says Alice.

"You can't," says Roderich.

"Is she going to be at this ball? With that donation of hers I'll bet she will be."

"Alice, no," says Roderich. "You would destroy my career."

"I've _built_  your career!" she screams.

"We have an agreement," says Roderich angrily. "You get whatever you want to write your novels, don't you? If this isn't working for you, we can reevaluate."

"Fine," says Alice. "Go on, then. Enjoy your silly ball. Dance the night away and let criminals loose, see if I care. You don't need me."

"Actually," says Roderich, "I do. They'll want a family man for the next promotion. It'll look a lot better. Which means..."

"Which means your girlfriend of three years, hanging off your arm," says Alice. "Sure. I get the picture now."

Roderich doesn't look happy. He never is when they fight. As Alice dresses in the nicest frock she owns - a simple olive green drop-waist gown with minimal floral embroidery - she thinks. She gets the impression he would be happiest with a passive relationship in which nothing - good _or_  bad - ever happened.

This is why we don't have any real chemistry, isn't it, she thinks. He has no passion, and I've too much. But we both get what we want, after a fashion. Don't we?

Isn't this what she wants?

Roderich escorts her into the car and tells her quietly, "I'll propose next month, and we'll have a spring wedding. And then it'll all work out, you'll see."

\--

The great hall of the ballhouse where the ball is held - formerly Bühler's, now Clärchen's - is exquisitely decorated with opulent chandeliers and intricate relief on the ceiling and walls, and everyone is handsome and beautiful, but Alice really doesn't care for any of it. "You know," says Roderich, "you could try and act a _little_ pleased. All the other wives are."

"You know what pleases me, and it's not this," says Alice.

"I don't even pretend to know what pleases you," says Roderich.

Alice turns away, not wanting to press the issue. She spots an entering pair of couples from the side, two single men, an officer, and then a semi-circle of people gather at the entrance to the great hall. There's a few flashes, and a flurry of speech, and then it dies down. Von Waldow enters the hall, and the press and her ardent admirers, with no tickets, are left behind. Von Waldow's hair is short, clipped neat around her sharp jaw, and she's put waves in it, along with a thick lace hairband decorated with a large heavy brooch that spouts long feathers like a fountain. She's all white, from her hair to the headband, to the feathers, to her shirt - white linen -

White linen.

A white shirt, thinks Alice, a red shirt...

"Are those _trousers_ ," says Roderich, aghast.

Now that he has drawn her attention to them - yes, they are. High waisted with wide legs and crisp pleats, belted in black. She's immaculately dressed, but it's her smiling dark mouth and her dancing eyes - neither painted, that would be whorish, and the trousers alone will ensure enough talk - that catch Alice's focus.

Alice doesn't even care that Roderich is gaping at her. She's doing it too.

It was her, thinks Alice, and I can prove it.

No, she thinks immediately after. I won't get into it. I can't get into it. My livelihood rests on this. Marry Roderich, do your research, solve his cases, write your novels, build your accolades. Don't follow this fox down a rabbit hole.

It must have been something big, what Lopukhin knew about von Waldow. What she's hiding. For her to have gone after him and - and shot him.

 _Because she did_. Because she was wearing white lace when she met with Lopukhin and wore red silk when she left the bar and there's no obvious reason to change her shirt unless it's covered in gunpowder and blood. And to go all the way out to her registered apartment in Lankwitz and return would have taken too long, and would have been noticeable.

But it's not Alice's concern anymore. Gabler said so because von Waldow paid him off. Maybe Gabler knows something they don't. Maybe it's for the better for some further, higher reason.

"Ah, Alice," says Roderich. "That's my boss. Here - Oberst Gabler! May I present ..."

This is Alice's first time meeting Gabler. He is an old-school sort with a square face in bone structure, which has over the years fleshed out to roundness in the cheeks. He could have been handsome twenty years and thirty kilo ago, but he isn't anymore. His moustache is gigantic and unruly. He looks like he thinks he's Bismarck. He probably has a pickelhaube he wears for sex with the ladies of the night he picks up at the Moka Efti. And in that moment, meeting Gabler, Alice knows there is no other reason for any of this than simple payoff greed.

"God, I need a drink," says Alice under her breath, so that Gabler, who is busy talking about his own accolades, doesn't hear her.

"This is always the worst part," says Roderich gently. "The socialising. Listen, we'll do it another hour, then we'll leave. Alright?"

"Fine," says Alice.

"Let's get us some drinks," says Roderich, to Gabler, and he prances off with his boss and leaves her there. The band begins to strike up a fast tune, and she, lacking a partner and hoping nobody will ask, moves to the side, to the wall. For a few moments, she watches the couples fox-trot. This gets boring quickly. She lifts herself off the wall by the shoulderblades and stands there, her arms awkward at the side. She crosses them, but that doesn't feel any better. Her right glove is slipping so she tugs it back on her wrist. Time passes so slowly when you don't want it to.

At last, there is a bump at her shoulder. Roderich has returned with a drink. Saved by alcohol! Well, it'll do. Alice turns around.

It's not Roderich.

"I think you were looking for me," says Maria von Waldow.

She has a sultry voice, deeper than Alice would have thought for a girl who dresses like she does. Her accent is thick, eastern. She trills the r's and softens her g's. Alice is weak at the knees and, she realises with horror, more aroused than Roderich has ever made her. Somewhere inside her she has to find her voice.

 _Then, meine Dame, someone has misled you_ , is what Alice should say.

But what she does say is, "Yes."

Von Waldow grins, a white, pearly smile full of sharp teeth. A shiver races down Alice's spine. It pools between her legs. This is bad. Oh, this is very bad. "I was thinking of a bit of a walk," says von Waldow. "I think I'd like some air. Maybe you'd accompany me?"

"Very well," says Alice, and follows more or less obediently. She tries not to watch von Waldow's silhouette but it fills her field of view and she finds herself cataloguing every curve with the scrutiny she uses on a case.

"But her," overhears Alice, "with that old shabby green dress, why ever would she pick her."

Suddenly, Alice is enraged. Is that really all I am to her? I'm another conquest? she wonders. No, I don't think so!

Once they've left the great hall of the ballhouse and are out of the view (but not earshot) of the guards staffing the hall's entrance, Alice gathers her courage and grabs von Waldow by her thin, silk-gloved wrist. The material is so fine it snags on Alice's middle-finger callous, formed where she holds her pens when writing. "Now you wait just a moment," she growls. "I think what I'd really like is some answers from you, your bloody _highness!_ "

"Keep your voice down!" von Waldow hisses.

Alice does, but not down enough. "Or what, you'll use your money to purchase _my_  silence too?"

And then von Waldow kisses her full, closed-mouthed, on the lips. Her mouth is soft and plush and hides all of her sharpness. Alice inhales sharply and gets a blast of von Waldow's perfume. Her vision reels in the musk of it. She's light-headed and if she thought her knees were weak before, she knew nothing of weakness as she stumbles and von Waldow catches her, then presses her into the wall. Then von Waldow is on her, leaning in, holding her there fast by her weight, flush connected from hips to breasts. The throb between Alice's legs becomes acute and tight and she gasps through a sudden mental orgasm.

It can't have been more than a second, but it isn't until von Waldow breaks the kiss that Alice realises how fleeting it was.

"You see," says von Waldow, "I don't need any money at all to purchase your silence." She knocks her hand out of Alice's grip in a deft, practiced swing - like Alice could offer any defence anyway - and grabs Alice's wrist, then tugs her down another hall. Here they meet a door, which von Waldow helps herself to. She shoves them both inside.

It's a small antechamber about the size of Alice's own bedroom, with stairs on the north wall that lead to the cellar. "What is wrong with you!" hisses Alice.

"What's wrong with _me?_ " says von Waldow. "There isn't anything wrong with me! _You're_ the one who couldn't shut up!"

"I _know_  you're the one who killed Lopukhin," she replies. "And I can prove it."

This wipes the smile off von Waldow's lovely face. It's how Alice notices the scar across her cheek. "Explain," says von Waldow.

"There's only one apartment registered under your name. But when I spoke to the cabbie who drove you home that night, he said 'the one out in Lankwitz'. This really implies that there's another. Why would he have said this if it were the only one?"

"Implies, doesn't prove," says von Waldow.

A fair point. "Alright, then consider that two people have declared - in statements! - that a cab was hailed from the dive bar and that you were home by midnight. But a further witness says you returned to the dive pub at quarter to one, and left an hour later on foot. Which is it? It can't be both."

Von Waldow narrows her pretty red eyes. "And who's the witness?"

"Well, unlike the first two, he wasn't paid off by your money, and so I'm inclined to believe him more," snaps Alice.

"But I really want to know," purrs von Waldow, advancing slowly where Alice cannot retreat. Alice flattens as best she can into the wall. "I really would know who that witness was."

"Meinecke," says Alice.

"Ach, _Meinecke!_ " says von Waldow, rolling her eyes. "For a moment there, I thought you might've found someone _important_. He's a pain in the ass, is what he is."

"He's an important statesman -"

"Are you sure he saw anything at all?" Von Waldow's laugh is somewhere between the bark of a dog and the caw of a crow. "He's getting on in years, and he spent all his time at the bar. Probably soused to his teeth, what's left of them. Besides, he's a conservative. He would do anything to discredit me. He's certainly got motive. I'm not surprised he likes to keep tabs on me - he hates that I can vote, hates further that I work for a living."

"And what _do_  you do for a living?" Because Alice isn't convinced writing is all of it.

"Don't you already know? I write for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. Culture section, mostly. It's why I attend all these benefits. If you're an investigator worth her salt - and about that," adds von Waldow nastily, "I'm reserving my judgement - then you already know all about it."

She already knows who I am, thinks Alice, she already knows what I'm doing. Part of her is terrified - how could she know? Roderich and she have been so careful! This would expose Roderich's career. The other part of her is thrilled and flattered. Von Waldow's been watching. "Yes, and I also know your family manages the factory in which it is printed," sneers Alice.

"Among other newspapers," says von Waldow. "Some of them left, some of them right. There's no bias. So, as to your witness?" She shrugs. Her shoulders are bony and pointed like the rest of her and move smoothly inside her blouse. Alice feels an itch in the palm of her hands and the tips of her fingers.

"Unless there's another pair of eyes that has been ... _watching_  me," von Waldow adds. She leans forward and the neckline of her blouse dips a little, framing the shadows of - Alice tears her glance away. Von Waldow smirks. "But I'm certain I don't know who they would belong to."

"Lopukhin was in love with you," Alice says.

"What if he was?"

"You don't deny it," says Alice.

"What's to deny? He was a silly boy, I entertain silly boys." Von Waldow is demure, studying her fingernails. Shorter than most women keep them. "To a point," she says.

"Until they step out of line," adds Alice.

"Ah, _you_  have said that, not me," says von Waldow.

"Well, if you didn't do it, then who did? That blond man with the slicked-back hair, the one you've been spotted with?" asks Alice. "Where was _he_ the night Lopukhin died? I'll bet he was with you. If you didn't do it, I'm sure you arranged it."

"You pay a lot of attention to the comings and goings of the men in my life," says von Waldow. "You're worse than my mother!"

"I notice you're not denying this either," says Alice.

"This is _Germany_ , I have a lot of tall blond friends here," says von Waldow. "You'll have to identify the one you mean."

Alice is caught her there - she can't. "Then what happened to the shirt?" she asks instead. "You wore white lace when you were at the bar. You wore red crimson silk when you returned to it and left later. What on earth would you have changed for?"

Von Waldow grimaces. "Well, men get grabby, you know," she says. "And in the process he tore the collar on my shirt."

Alice glares. "You could have repaired that," she says. "It was handmade lace."

But von Waldow shrugs. "The rich throw everything away, as I'm sure you say. Listen. I really don't know why you're so adamant about all of this -"

"Then I'll summarise," says Alice. The interruption sparks a flash of ire in von Waldow's expression and Alice wants to frame that and the feeling of power it gives her. "Lopukhin's been after you for weeks. That has been in all the society pages, especially since his advances recently grew more and more deliberate, more public. You don't like that. Or another paramour of yours doesn't like it - perhaps that blond fellow. Perhaps your family, because Lopukhin's reputation is less than golden and you don't want him bringing you down. Either way, it has to stop, but you do nothing about it until Lopukhin forces your hand by confronting you at the bar. You reject him - you must have, or your reaction at seeing his dead body wouldn't have been so wooden. He flies out and you - you go after him. Why? You wanted him gone. You got what you wanted. _Now_  you chase?

"Because he knows something about you. What, I don't know," Alice is freely admitting this part, but the way von Waldow's face falls she knows she's hit the mark. "Maybe you're with child, or you've secretly married, or you're having an affair. Maybe it isn't even important to this case. But you go after him to protect your reputation and your standing, you'll secure that, at the expense of Lopukhin's life. And you know him now, you've seen his advances. You might bring a friend, because you don't have the strength to dispose of him alone.

"But you have got a gun. Maybe he _does_  ruin your shirt - maybe he struggles. Maybe he just bleeds all over you after you shoot him in the head.

"I think you give him one last chance and he fucks it up. So down he goes. The body you have enough strength to tip over onto the tracks; the blood spatter on the back wall of the subway tile, you throw his bottle of wine at that. There it explodes and in so doing washes most - but not all - of the brain matter away, and scatters glass shards everywhere. To exonerate yourself, you identify the body, you establish yourself as last contact. You know that your family and your family's money will protect you, as they've always done with your run-ins with the law. I wonder how many cover ups like this they've had to conceal. How many of your boyfriends can't accept a no and have to be driven off with force?" Alice shakes her head, in disbelief. "You must know if you married by now, you could be free from all that."

"If I'm married I could be free! Hah!" Another bark-caw of a laugh, but this one is colder. Von Waldow is shaking her head. "You know, you spun a tasty morsel of a tale up until that point. I like the sound of your lies but that was a fabrication too far."

"Lies?"

"Oh yes, miss Kirkland," purrs von Waldow. "It didn't happen like that at all -"

There's a knock from outside.

They both shut up.

A silence, then another knock. Then a gruff-voiced guard speaks. "Listen, if there's gonna be a catfight," he warns.

"Oh, we'll behave," says von Waldow.

"Then do so in the great hall," the guard says. "There's no access here."

Blast, thinks Alice. She was so entranced she hadn't heard a single footfall. "Don't think I don't know that your family has already paid a handsome sum for our benefit," whispers Alice. "Sounds like bribery."

"It's unrelated," says von Waldow.

"Is it?" asks Alice. "I can't help notice it results in you, springing free without a speck of dirt on you. What a coincidence."

"Maybe because there's nothing there," says von Waldow.

"Maybe because it doesn't stick to something so smooth and slippery," says Alice. "Like the eel you are."

"There's no need to be so cruel," says von Waldow. "Look, I'm free to leave. Unless you have some firm evidence on which to charge me?"

But Alice has naturally nothing. She would need a really good reason to hold von Waldow or bring her in for questioning. Or make her give her the skirt she was wearing at the time of Lopukhin's death (since the shirt appears to be gone) to test for blood and gunpowder. All of what Alice has said is merely circumstantial. Proving it would not be difficult, but that means some sort of paperwork, which means some sort of charge. Von Waldow easily has enough money to spring free from arrest.

"I'll find out what Lopukhin knew about you," Alice promises. "You _know_  I can. You know I will. You know it's only a matter of time."

This much, von Waldow clearly believes. "Tell you what," she says. "If you really want to know, I'll simply tell you. But you have to come to me. Come by Potsdamer tonight at midnight. There's a cafe there. It's ... not a nice place. But there you can meet my friend - well, one of them - since you're so interested in them." She puts her weight on one leg, her hip cocked, audacious. "Show up, if you want. If you dare."

"I'll be there," Alice says.

"Good," croons von Waldow. "We'll be looking forward to it. You'll present yourself at the back of the house where the stairs are, and you'll ask if there are any messages for you. My people will take care of the rest."

"Isn't that comforting," she replies.

"And Alice," von Waldow continues. She draws closer, advancing step by step with her echo heels, slow as Alice's heartbeat is fast. Then she leans in and says in a low, bedroom voice, "You should know this offer extends only to you."

There's nothing to reply in time before she opens the door to the gruff-voiced guard. Von Waldow tucks her sultrier mannerisms safely away under a prim, noble guise of superiority and strides away.

Alice returns to Roderich. "I'm not feeling well," she says.

"Really?" says Roderich. "But you've hardly -"

"Feminine troubles, you know," she says. Roderich pales.

"I'll handle this young man," says Gabler, boisterously throwing an arm around Roderich's shoulders - probably already soused - "you go on home and sleep it off, young lady."

\--

Calling what it is at Potsdamer Platz a cafe is a stretch. It's a dive, worse than Ruschel's was (Ruschel's had a nicely kept front facade, they at least were trying). This place is crumbling and looks like nobody cares.

But there's no entrance at the back of the place. There's a door, and Alice knocks, but nobody answers. Guess that means she has to go through the front entrance, from the street.

Alice is no longer overdressed in any sense of the word. She had a suspicion from what von Waldow had said. So she did truly go home first, to change out of - what was it that girl had said loudly? _That old shabby green dress_. That ancient frock wouldn't do. Alice doesn't own anything nearly as fashionable as what some are wearing. But she has a delicate lacy black slip, and a bright beaded shawl. Paired together, they almost look like one of those modern dresses that the dancers wear. So Alice walks into a den of wolves, wearing only lingerie, and a stroke of eyeliner drawn up the back of her thighs, past midnight. No stockings - not even bloomers - because it marred the smooth silhouette of the satin, and then it _really_  looked like lingerie.

Of course she's terrified. She's never appeared in public in so little, and brings the tiny brim of her cloche down to obscure her face. I'll have my answers, she tells herself. This will be worth it.

Once within, some of the eyes are on her. Only the women, who recognise what is clearly a chemise. But most don't even take note. Evidently few people find anything wrong with a girl in a long lace slip draped in beads. How is it any different from what the other girls are wearing in the clubs, anyway?

She makes her way to the back of the house, past the stage. This is clearly a cabaret, after hours, and they're between acts. The dancers probably go naked, thinks Alice. The thought doesn't arouse her as much as Maria von Waldow does. Well, there's something, at least.

She spots a set of stairs leading down past the bar, behind a desk. The person staffing the desk can't be easily identified as male or female, but they're in any case awfully beautiful, with heavily made-up eyes, perfect pincurls, and a rosebud mouth. "You're new," they say. "Did Frau Kupplerin interview you? You're not her usual squeeze. But you're not Herr Schlepper's, either."

"I'm not working," says Alice icily. "My name's Kirkland."

"Is that Alice or Arthur," they reply.

Clever. She ought to have known. "Both," says Alice.

They smile, enigmatic. "Good answer. You'll follow me," they say, and nod to the great boulder of a bouncer to let Alice through.

They lead Alice down the stairs and through a twisting and dimly lit hall. There's doors left and right, all closed, all chalked with tally marks. One of them has a high count and a scream sounds from within. "Is that for this week?" asks Alice.

"That's from tonight," the desk manager drawls.

Maybe I'll just shut up, thinks Alice, before I call too much attention to how I don't belong.

At last they come to the end of the hall and a single door. From the way the hall turned, they must be directly under the front entrance. "Here's you," says the desk manager. "Enjoy."

Inside, the walls are daubed with heavy velvet curtains. There is a blue haze of smoke - not cigarette, it smells like incense - a bed, and a desk, at which a single man is seated in a high-backed chair. His back is straight in his well-pressed white shirt, thin material that reveals an undershirt, confined to his shoulders by his suspenders. His hair is white, pinned inside a newsboy cap. White, not blond, Alice notes.

There were two of them, thinks Alice suddenly. This was the murderer all along -!

"Well," says the man, in a voice she almost recognises, "make yourself comfortable. We don't have all night." He gestures ... to the bed.

"You can't be serious," says Alice, "I hardly know you."

The man gets up and turns. "Sure you do," he says. He gives her a rakish half-smile that probably works on most women.

"It _was_  you," says Alice.

"It was always me," says Maria von Waldow. She advances slowly. Her heels don't click anymore, she's wearing men's shoes. And men's trousers, though she's had them tailored for her hips, because they look better on her than they ever look on any man. And she wears a man's shirt, and a man's cap. Alice isn't certain which is more dangerous, Maria herself or Maria incognito. She backs away, step by step, only as far as she can go; von Waldow doesn't seem to notice, until Alice's bare unstockinged calves hit the bed. "I thought I told you to get comfortable," von Waldow adds, breathing down her neck. She interrupts her cavalier stance to remove her hands from her pockets, take Alice by the shoulders, and throw her flat on the bed.

"If it makes you feel any better, you can call me Gilbert," she offers. "Von Waldow has to be the pretty face, but Beilschmidt handles the _dirty_  work." She puts a knee on one side of Alice's. Alice props herself up to her elbows and von Waldow watches her carefully. When she's satisfied she puts her other knee on the bed, pinning Alice there.

Alice doesn't stop her. Alice is watching Maria von Waldow's mouth and remembering what it felt like to kiss her lips.

"It doesn't," she whispers, "it doesn't make me feel any better."

Maria von Waldow grins. Her teeth look larger, shaper than most women's. The scar on her cheek makes her look lethal. Because, well, she is. "It's nobody's name, if that's what you were thinking," she says. "I never took it from anybody. My father told me he would've named me that, if I were a born a boy. And then he got his boy, in the end, but called him Ludwig."

Ludwig was the bastard Beilschmidt. "Ludwig went to war," realises Alice. "It was Ludwig's gun you used."

"He gave it to me. It's _my_  gun," says Maria. She leans lower and presses their bodies flush. It's now that Alice can feel a hard something in Maria's pocket, something long and thin and cylindrical.

"You have it on you even now," says Alice. "Did they tailor the holster for your hips, too?"

Maria smirks. "That's not a gun," she says. "But it is a weapon that I can use to make you scream. If you're interested in _all_  my secrets."

Interested? She shouldn't be.

"Yes," breathes Alice.

Maria splays her fingers over Alice's bare thigh. "No stockings," she says.

"They didn't look right," admits Alice.

"You were wise to come prepared," says Maria. As she draws her hand up Alice's thigh, she takes the lacey hem of Alice's slip with her. She leans forward, bringing their faces close, their mouths close, and Alice thinks she'll kiss her and without thinking, arches up, her lips parted ... but Maria bypasses her entirely and reaches further for a flask on the side table.

"You want a drink?" she asks. She twists the flask open one-handed, then offers the neck to Alice.

Alice shakes her head.

"Oh, come on, it's just brandy," says Maria. She swigs from it deeply herself. "There, now you know it's not poisoned."

"Thanks," says Alice, "I'll pass."

"Suit yourself," says Maria, "I won't." She tips the flask and splashes brandy over Alice's chest. What doesn't stain her chemise lies wet on her skin for a scant second before Maria's tongue is quickly there, laving it up. "You know," she says, against Alice's skin, "if I wanted you dead, you'd _be_  dead, and that's an end of it."

"That what you do to all your problems?" Alice says. Her voice has become breathy.

"I really try not to, it leaves a trail," says Maria. "I don't like to leave a trail." She licks one across Alice's chest to her neck. "Smart cookies like you tend to follow them," she murmurs. "I'd rather be like a diffuse cloud. You can't really pick out anything from that. That's why I have my fingers in many pies, so you can't tell what I'm really doing." Her fingers creep further up Alice's dress, pushing the hemline along Alice's thighs.

"And what's that?" says Alice.

Maria shifts her weight, displacing first one thigh, and then the other, between Alice's, spreading her legs now that her slip is ruched up high on her waist. Maria could smell her now, probably. Maria can see everything she needs to, and she takes her time to look her fill. Alice's cheeks warm; she knows she's bright red, but stone cold sober. "You're right that Lopukhin knew something about me," Maria says.

"He was in on it," says Alice. Maria smiles and lowers her mouth between Alice's legs. At the first touch of tongue, Alice moans. "Oh god," she says.

"He had different plans," says Maria, murmuring the words between mouthing at Alice, her voice low and rumbling, that Alice can feel it against her flesh. "It was a shame."

"Paris," Alice realises. Maria rewards her with a cruel flick of her tongue and Alice arches, panting.

"He should have taken my advice." Maria pauses between sentences to lick. "He should have left. Paris would've been good for him. Would've taught him a thing or two."

"Berlin's too hot?" Alice squirms. Maria grabs her by the thighs and pins her there.

"He would have made it hotter than it already is. And I can't have him playing around in my sandbox!" Maria leans in again and circles her tongue around Alice's clit. Alice squirms more, but fruitlessly, her thighs held fast where they are, keeping her wide and open.

"Ah - underground - _o-oh_ \- mob connections?" Alice can barely get a thought out.

"Hmmm," says Maria, her lips closed around Alice's clit, which feels brilliant and terrible beyond words. "Nothing of the sort - but you know, that's a good idea -"

"Drugs?" Alice gasps. She's so close already.

"Oh, hadn't thought of that." Maria backs up and sits back on her haunches, satisfied, her mouth glistening. "I like you!" she declares merrily, and licks her lips.

"What is it, then?" asks Alice, panting.

"What's left, girl?" Maria undoes the button fastenings on her trousers and pushes them down her hips, far enough to expose that she isn't wearing any underthings either, except for some sort of ribbon looped around her thighs and hips. It's a holster, of a sort, realises Alice. From Maria's other pocket, she draws one of those massagers for women's medical use, and fits it inside the holster, preparing it _distinctly not for medical use_ , adjusting it tight with the ribbons until like the boy she's emulating, the instrument juts out from between her legs, curtained at the sides by the tails of her now-untucked shirt.

To look at her makes Alice throb almost painfully. She's never wanted roderich like this. She's never wanted anyone like this.

Maria notices her watching and smirks again. She leans forward and rubs the tip of the instrument against Alice's clit, then says, "You don't get it until you answer me."

"Politics," Alice spills, "it's polit-aah!" She breaks off into a sharp cry, because Maria has pressed the tip of the toy at Alice's hole and pushes it in slowly.

"Politics," Maria agrees. She shifts her hips, manipulating the instrument out of Alice, before she fucks it back in her again. "That fool has never gotten over the times. That aristocrats like us have no place in this world! Not unless we carve it out for ourselves. It isn't simply given to us anymore."

Maria talks like she's trying to pretend she's unaffected by any of this, but her eyes are wide and her cheeks are red, and sometimes when she shifts all the way inside the instrument presses against something that makes her breath hitch. I wonder if she's ever fucked a woman, thinks Alice.

"So you make a place for yourself - hah - in politics?"

"In everything. But politics is important. We need to effect a change in this country. Oh, Berlin - Prussia - is stable, and that's with help from people like me, but not for long."

"And - ngh - people like him want another war?" Alice suggests. Maria shifts further, deeper, and Alice cants her hips back unthinkingly, arching for more.

"They weren't too happy with the way it went. They think maybe, best two out of three." The string of Alice's chemise slips down her left shoulder. "Oh," sighs Maria. She leans forward, above Alice now, and reaches out to smooth the other string off Alice's shoulder. She goes further, and with the force of her next thrust, knocks Alice's breasts above the neckline of her dress. She cups one, experimental, thumbing the nipple. The look on her face is wondrous and awed.

By this time Alice is pushing back, meeting her thrusts, using her elbows to lever herself better onto Maria. "The last war nearly ruined Europe," Alice breathes.

"Out of the ashes, they think, rises something better," says Maria. She fucks in deep and pinches Alice's nipple.

Alice manages, "A red star?"

"Lopukhin was no communist," says Maria. "He wanted what he _had_. He wanted power, he wanted his position back, and he thought that inflaming the people towards nationalism was a great way to do it."

Maria smoothes her hand from Alice's breast to her waist, bringing the lace with it. Alice is naked but for a belt of satin and beads. She spreads her legs farther. Maria grasps her by the hip and angles her to thrust in deep. She's ruined Alice for anyone else. "How?" she asks. It's the only word she can get out. Even it is moaned.

"He's not the only one who's realised they're opposing forces," says Maria. She builds a steady pace to her words, punctuating them with thrusts. "Poland's supporting similar efforts across governments at tipping points. Those that have a patriotic lean have invested emotion against Lenin's gift - socialist revolution from Moscow? Hah! Not for a band of brothers, all proud countrymen, who don't want to be dictated to by foreigners! Lopukhin thinks, if enough Germans are encouraged in this nationalist supremacy again, they're easily inflamed to action, and it's an army the whites could use."

"Do - _ah_ , do _you_  think so?" asks Alice. She reaches up and takes Maria by the arm. There's strength in her here too. Alice shudders.

"I know so," says Maria darkly. "There's groups for it already. They're loud about it. They want their family back. They want their country back. And their plans don't include people like me. Oh, it's all too easy to do, an idiot like Lopukhin could do it!"

"Or, _ha-ah_  - a conservative, ungh, like Meinecke," musters Alice, "who knew Lopukhin, aa _-ah-!_  - and lied about it." With her other hand, she touches Maria's lips, thinking about them again. She drifts her touch lower to the slimness of Maria's graceful white neck and fumbles at the buttons, aching to see her, but her fingers won't work properly to undo them one-handed. Her mind barely works. With every thrust Maria has her mind spinning and desperate. She needs more.

"I'm sick and tired of shitty leadership," says Maria. "You want to lead this place, you put yourself as first servant of state. I'd give my _life_  to the progress of this place if they let me, but - why, look at me!" She takes Alice's hand in her own and pushes them both down, and they take the buttons of her fine white shirt with them; beneath is the undershirt, and beneath that a bust-restraining brassiere, the kind girls wear to perfect that popular stick-straight silhouette. But totally curveless, Maria is not.

"Some things never change," says Alice.

"Some things should," vows Maria, as she pumps into Alice, "some things _will_."

"Ah! Your ambition -"

"- won't let some rat of a man stand in the way and take my land down with it!" cries Maria, triumphant. Alice arches helplessly, one hand on Maria's arm, the other on the collar of Maria's undershirt, tugging her close to fuck herself harder, as she tightens down on Maria's cock and screams. Maria fucks her through it, watching her carefully as she winds down.

At last Alice lies back, her legs limp, her fingers sore with the way she clung, spent and breathless. "You're - _hah_  - a spy?" she pants.

"I'm a Prussian," spits Maria. She's still inside her. She doesn't seem to have any intention of leaving. "We don't _do_  duplicity."

Alice frowns. "They're not even paying you?"

"You've got to understand, this new republic of ours has factions," she explains. "Some like what I'm doing. Some don't. Those that don't, don't know. And it will stay that way. But _I_ need to know what _they're_  doing."

"And what are they doing," asks Alice, fearful that she already knows.

Maria sighs heavily. "Rearming," she says. She pulls out of Alice entirely and begins to loosen the straps on the base of the toy.

"They can't," says Alice. "I-it's illegal - you can't be for this."

"I'm for it if I can put the right people in the right places at the right time!" Maria snaps. The toy loosed, she yanks it out and throws it on the bed, where it rolls towards Alice with her weight and nestles next to her, staining her slip. "Do you think it's fair in a land like this, with the neighbours we have, to be defenceless?"

"You want them armed," says Alice.

"Not if a demagogue is at the switch, telling who to fire what cannons," says Maria.

"You _don't_  want them armed."

"My land," says Maria, "has always had an army. Some say, it was always more army than land. You rip that from people and you trod them down and do you expect them to thank you for it? No. I expect them to revolt. Other people want that. So they'll stir the pot. But they won't do the hard work! Nobody who actually will do any fighting wants revolution!"

"So you're a communist," says Alice. "Or a pacifist. Or a democrat, or a conservative. Or a monarchist or a republican."

"I'm what needs to be, to see this republic through. If we can make it two generations with peace, I'll be satisfied."

She doesn't look particularly satisfied, in any sense of the word or its context. Still jelly-legged, Alice pulls herself to a seated position. "We have an expression in my language," she says. She takes Maria's soft, manicured, fine-fingered lady's hand in both her own. "Jack of all trades, master of none. Don't spread yourself too thin."

Maria rips her hand away from Alice. "I didn't bring you here for _advice!_ "

Maria's legs are spread between her own thighs, so Alice puts her hand between Maria's, to better feel her gasp. Her hair here is as white as the hair on her head, the flesh warm and wet, so wet that almost by accident, Alice's fingers slip past her clit. She returns them up and strokes across it, watching Maria's expression. "You might take it anyhow," murmurs Alice.

"Surely you're offering something else," Maria replies. "Oh - don't stop," she sighs. " _Don't stop, please._ " She grabs Alice by the shoulder for control and begins to ride her hand.

Alice leans up to take her open mouth. Maria gasps in surprise and pulls the breath from Alice. She moans, muffled, and tries to kiss back with a tongue that doesn't work, when orgasm hits. She leans back, her cap askew, and gasps as she shakes apart in Alice's hand.

Slowly Alice brings her fingertips to her mouth and touches her lips, idly, like lost in a reverie. She licks them clean. The taste isn't pleasant, but Maria's face when she does it is. Maria's delicately-shaped white brows furrow together, drawing lines on that immaculate flushed face, and her lips part again. She tips her weight forward against Alice and somewhere between the connection of their bodies together, and connection with the bed, she kisses her, deep and passionate. They fall back there, mouthing at each other despite their exhaustion.

"We can't stay here," says Maria, between kisses. "It's... this isn't a place you spend the night - neither of us want to be seen exiting tomorrow morning."

"I have a place not far from here," says Alice.

Maria pulls back. "Yes," she says, guarded. "I already know."

Alice frowns. "Your resources," she realises.

"If you don't like it," begins Maria, "you've danced with the wrong girl."

"I don't fancy being watched," says Alice.

"Says the girl who's been doing nothing but checking up on me for days now!" crows Maria. "That's rich."

"You're the hypocrite to call me rich when _you're_  the one who shot a man, then covered it up using Mother's money!"

Maria glares. "I did all of that myself, and I don't mind telling _you_ ," she says.

Something about the way she says it has Alice thinking. It has the blood in her veins chilled. "You're going to make sure I never talk," she realises.

Of course. Why else would she have divulged all her secrets? Why else did she bring Alice here? Why did she say everything she did? She never intended to have Alice leave with this information, not the way she came in.

Alice is a fool, Maria never wanted her, she only wanted to know what Alice knew for certain.

But then, why bring her here? Alice told her everything she knew at the policemen's ball. And it wasn't even close to anything damning. Maria could have blown her off. Maria didn't even have to meet her! She could have called any of the officers and told them about it, had a guard posted at Potsdamer Platz, watched as Alice walked inside of her own free will in lingerie after blowing off the ball with her steady, secure boyfriend.

But instead, Maria drew her in, to a spider's web, and told her nigh on everything, all her plans.

Very suddenly, Alice feels her life is in danger, and the fight instinct fled her with the adrenaline she used when she came. Now she just wants to _run_.

"Like I said," adds Maria, "I don't need money to _buy_  your silence." Her hair spilling out in tufts from the newsboy cap, her shirt ripped open, exposing herself at the trousers, she leaves the bed for the desk, where she shouts, "Ludwig, could you be a dear and call Miss Kirkland a cab?"

There's no answer. Maria seems to have expected this. "Get out," she says icily. "Your ride's out front."

"Hmph," says Alice. She gets to her feet, rights her slip and the shawl until it almost looks like a real dress - there's no mirror in this room, so she doesn't get to know how badly she fails, but from Maria's smirk it seems quite heavily - and says, "You know, for a lady of your upbringing, you've no bedside manner."

" _You're_ the one who brought up talking," says Maria. She takes a cigarette from a small case on the desk and lights it. She says nothing else, so when Alice leaves she slams the door.

There's a black car outside, on the other side of the street. When Alice sees it, the lights flash on and off, revealing a licence plate number 620-E-11. She walks up to the window. "Are you -"

"Get in, Miss Kirkland," says the driver, a deep-voiced man. His hat is pulled low, and the brim obscures any identifying details, but something about his demeanour has Alice guessing.

"Ludwig?" she asks.

The driver says nothing.

Alice meekly gets into the backseat.

The ride home is silent but blessedly quick. The driver pulls to a stop beside Alice's apartment house within minutes. Still, it's nearly two am. Her landlady will be so upset to have her home so late. There's a possibility she'll be so upset she'll tell Roderich, with whom she's on a first-name and familiar-pronoun basis.

Alice hasn't thought about Roderich in about three hours. Honestly, it's been a joy.

How am I going to face him, she wonders, knowing what I know now? How am I going to be a policeman's wife? A sexless, loveless marriage, with obligations for solving crimes. How will that change when the promotions he attains will come with the expectation of children?

She thinks.

Arthur Kirkland doesn't have to keep writing crime novels from the point of view of the detective, does he? Suppose he wrote them from the villain's. Perhaps not quite a villain. A gentleman thief. A gentlewoman thief. A gentlewoman killer? Well, Arsène Lupin she's not, but Maria von Waldow is nothing if not inspiring.

I can't do this anymore, Alice thinks. And Roderich deserves to know that.

"When I said I had a place not far from here," says Alice, to the driver, "what I meant was, it was an invitation."

The driver, again, says nothing.

"Fine," she says, "be that way," and slams the car door. A light turns on inside her apartment house on the ground level, and she walks up the step, preparing herself to deal with her ancient landlady.

\--

Alice sleeps until 8am after the dressing-down her landlady gives her. The landlady doesn't comment on the fact that she's wearing a slip, but even though the garment is black, _does_  note the stains on it, as well as Alice's poor job at stuffing her long unfashionable pigtails into her cloche, and the reek of brandy on her. She assumes that Roderich and she have finally taken steps towards marriage, but warns her against any more _cameraderie_ , because after all, why should he buy the cow when he can get the milk for free. Alice represses disgust thinking about _Roderich getting milk_.

She doesn't set her landlady straight but it's a difficult task. She feels no better at lying than Classic Prussian Maria von Waldow. But somehow, the landlady believes her.

In the morning she receives no phone call from Roderich. Nothing saying he knows. Nothing saying he doesn't know. This isn't atypical, so she dresses and prepares to meet him for their usual coffee.

Parked outside her apartment house, on the opposite side of the street, is the black car again, same licence plate 620-E-11. Same driver. In the daylight, with his fedora removed inside the car, Alice can see he is blond, with slicked-back hair. He has Maria's eye shape and her cheekbones.

She has a feeling she knows what's expected of her.

Alice gets into the car, in the back. "That's for you," says Ludwig, and holds out an envelope.

She peers inside. Photographs, from the size. So this is how they want to buy her silence: through extortion.

Brazenly, she upends the envelope and dumps them on her lap. They're very damning, and from this angle Maria herself never looks like anything less than a real man, if a bit slender. From some angles Alice is entirely exposed, on Maria's cock, her back arched, her breasts spilling out of the chemise, her pigtails strewn on the bed. It remains difficult to tell but some of the pictures show the ribbons that tie the toy to Maria herself.

Alice's face is, in all of them, perfectly clear.

"We don't care about money, as you know," says Ludwig. "But you try and say one single thing about my sister's exploits, those go to your boyfriend's office. Whether it's all of them depends. We'll have to see what his allegiances are, first. If he likes the sound of what's happening in Munich, these days, it might be the ones that show you're with a woman."

"That lot doesn't care about what women do with each other," says Alice. "They don't think we're people."

"They care if you're a foreign whore, cuckolding a true-blooded German," says Ludwig.

The correction is, by now, second nature to Alice. "He's Austrian."

Ludwig grimaces. "Doesn't matter to them."

Alice picks up one of the images. "Do I really look like that," she muses. "Why on earth would she have done something so ridiculous - with someone who looks like me."

"Why does my sister do anything," says Ludwig, sounding tired. "Well? Do you understand?"

Certainly she understands. She puts the pictures back in the envelope and tucks the envelope into her purse, next to the one of dead Lopukhin. "You know, you take nice shots," she says. "Bet you spent a lot of time carefully getting the focus right. I imagine seeing your sister did nothing for you. But on the shots with me - you've got an eye for the technical details. Haven't you."

"Do you _understand_ ," repeats Ludwig.

"I understand that Roderich won't care," she says. "And he'll stand on my side about this kind of trickery, which can't even be proven beyond hearsay. I've never done anything like this before. There's no precedent."

"But wouldn't your family care?" adds Ludwig. "After all, you've spent some of their money, living large in Berlin with your boyfriend - probably a homosexual, given how unsatisfied you are that you seek out your own homosexual dalliances. Most damnable is the infiltration of the Berlin police - by a foreigner no less." Ludwig smirks. It's Maria's smirk too. "We could spin much. We could string you up on a lot more than just moral charges," he says.

"So I see," Alice murmurs.

"So," says Ludwig, "I'll ask again." Now he turns around in the car to face her. His eyes are steel like Maria's are fire. They're related, alright. "Do you understand?"

"Don't _you_  understand?" says Alice. Ludwig frowns. "You could buy my silence with my company. The more I know, the less I can leave. And you know you won't worry about me being a drain. I'm a lot smarter than the poor fellow your sister had strung along."

"Why would you want this?"

"Why have I always wanted this," murmurs Alice. "When I could have had a happy little home life with Roderich? Why does your sister want it, when she could have had her happy little rich life - why, with any number of suitors, I'm sure!"

"Be that as it may," begins Ludwig.

"Where's she going next?" interrupts Alice. "She isn't staying. I can tell from your face that she isn't sticking around." Ludwig is too sore, likely at being left behind to take care of business in his sister's absence.

Ludwig doesn't say anything, but he looks away, sorry that he's given something away with his expression alone. "Why would you care? Is it even worth asking? Why would you get yourself into this?"

Because Alice has to see how far down the rabbit hole goes. "I want to get to the bottom of whatever the hell she's really doing," she says.

And maybe, she thinks, trembling in her seat, I might love her.

"And your detective boyfriend?" asks Ludwig.

Alice simply smiles. "If _he'd_ solved those cases, maybe Maria would have wanted to sleep with him. But she didn't, did she?"

A silence passes as Ludwig thinks.

"It's Stralsund next," he says at last.

"Then take me to the train station," she says.

"She might not want your help," says Ludwig.

"I think she'll find a _position_ for me," replies Alice. "I hear there's been an opening."


End file.
